The Short Life, Public Execution and Resurrection of John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness

Was it an Orwellian nightmare or an intelligence savior? John Poindexter says TIA was sucked into a vortex of politics and knee-jerk foolishness before anyone could answer that question.

"Oh, I think the concept [of a futures market] is clearly sound," says Poindexter, coolly analyzing the controversy. Give smart people with information an incentive to be right, and they will be more right than if they have no incentive. Another benefit to the incentive system: It provides an avenue for disgruntled terrorists to attempt to profit from their insider knowledge.

"If the concept had proven successful, it would probably have been implemented in a couple of ways, " Poindexter says. "One would be open markets on some questions and closed markets (maybe within the intelligence community) on the more sensitive kinds of questions. The problem we were struggling with within the closed market was what the incentive would be. You probably wouldn't use dollars. But those are all questions that need to be explored."

However, after FutureMAP was outed and the so-called assassination futures unearthed ("We never would have approved those questions being put out to the public," says Poindexter), the reaction was swift and terminal. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) wrote to Poindexter: "Spending taxpayer dollars to create terrorism betting parlors is as wasteful as it is repugnant. The American people want the federal government to use its resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it."

Poindexter resigned two weeks later, though he denies that the FutureMAP furor spurred his resignation. He says he'd been planning to leave anyway.Flashing Lights"I think if I had to do it over again," he says, "I'd do it the same way. I would just put more resources into getting the public diplomacy part much stronger than we were able to. DARPA has a $3 billion budget, and there's a single public affairs person and a single legislative affairs person. There's no full-time [legal] counsel. I told the director of DARPA that I think it's a significant problem if DARPA is going to continue to take on controversial issues. A full public affairs, legislative affairs and legal staff has got to be on hand."

Poindexter cites one instance where a bigger support staff could have helped him in his own presentation of TIA. He recalls a particular schematic diagram of one TIA project where, in the middle, there was a little box: "a filter," he says, referring to the so-called privacy appliance. "The purpose of that filter was very complicated. But essentially it was there to provide privacy protection. But we didn't make the box very big, and it wasn't really clear what it was for."